


Who You Are in the Dark

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Series: Alpha Timeline Fluff [12]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alpha Timeline, Angst and Feels, Fate & Destiny, Fifteen Minute Fic, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Implied Relationships, Love, Multi, Prophetic Visions, Sleeping Together, Slice of Life, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-24
Updated: 2014-09-24
Packaged: 2018-02-18 16:15:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2354702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not safe to meet in person, to make these tiny, transient bubbles of illusory comfort.  It's not safe, and it can't last.  Rose/Jade/Dave in the Alpha Timeline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who You Are in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet was inspired by the 6/8/14 word #190 on [15_minute_ficlets](http://15_minute_ficlets.dreamwidth.org). It takes place between [Mad Science Family Reunion](http://archiveofourown.org/works/612452) and [The stream of everything that runs away](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1949937), which both happen during the same visit to Rose's house. (The visit mentioned in [Food and Cheer and Song](http://archiveofourown.org/works/522621), which involved a camping trip and Girl Scout songs, happens a couple years earlier, before Jake's meteor disrupts Jade's life.)

It's not safe to meet in person, you think as you lie on your bed, sandwiched awkwardly between Dave and Jade. The mattress is not large enough for the three of you together, but you know the purchase of a larger one would be marked. You are reflexively private, moreso now that you know who is watching your every move and waiting for you to slip.

Dave's head is tucked into your neck, the soft tissue of his nose mashed against the hard bones of your shoulder. He is breathing through his mouth, a ridiculous, rhythmic whistling sigh. His hands are wrapped around your arm, fingers gripping your wrist like the hilt of a sword.

Jade lies flat on her stomach, head turned away from you and toward the temporary crib she whipped out of her sylladex this morning. Her right arm is folded up between her body and yours, pinning your own arm down beneath the sheet. Her hand rests on your other shoulder, fingers lax and curved with age and sleep.

They don't need protecting any more than you do, and you know all too well how their lives will -- _must_ \-- end. You can't stuff this little bubble of space and time into a box and lock it away behind glass. All you can do is trace the glowing threads of chance forward as they unravel and unfurl, a dazzling web of what-if and then-what spread across the future.

So many threads end in destruction. Even the ones that feel like victory wink out as they cross the boundary between this universe and the infinite worlds beyond. In this life, you cannot win. The dice are weighted, the cards marked, the entrails stirred by a malicious hand before they are presented to be read.

You will do what you can do which is what you must do, and end as nothing but naked will: your self stripped to its cruelest essence and aimed with terrible purpose toward that single, shining path, whose end you will not live to reach. You cannot take anything with you. Everything will fall away but the light that burns inside your very bones.

It's not safe to meet in person, to make these tiny, transient bubbles of illusory comfort.

It's not safe, and it can't last.

Dave snorts and drools onto your shoulder. Jade kicks vaguely sideways in response, toes digging into the flesh of your calf.

You close your eyes and wrap the memory of this moment in light, to carry with you into darkness.


End file.
